The Vatican Museums broke their own record for visitor numbers to any site in Italy in 2011, attracting more than five million people for the first time, Director Antonio Paolucci said Tuesday. “By December 31, at midnight, 5,078,004 people had entered the pope’s museums,” Paolucci told Vatican daily l’Osservatore Romano.

Paolucci said the figure was “particularly impressive” given that the second-biggest tourist lure in Italy, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, only managed to attract one and a half million people last year”.

via ANSA